R.S. Thomas Quotes

Singing is not about timbres or category labels, singing is about fascinating acoustical properties like the colors of the human voice which derive from thought and emotion.

We don't present our voices to the audience, we resonate our souls.

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.

It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!

Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.

Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

War makes rattling good history.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.

What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.

… It is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.

The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.

To reject wisdom because the person communicates it is uncouth and his manners are inelegant, what is it but to throw away a pine-apple, and assign for a reason the roughness of its coat?

When men cease to be faithful to their God, he who expects to find them so to each other will be much disappointed.

In the heraldry of heaven goodness precedes greatness; so on earth it is more powerful. The lowly and the lovely may frequently do more in their own limited sphere than the gifted.

No cloud can overshadow a true Christian but his faith will discern a rainbow in it.

The rose that all are praising Is not the rose for me.

I'm saddest when I sing.

Don't brood on the past, but don't forget it either.

Death when to death a death by death hath given Then shall be op't the long shut gates of heaven. [Mors, mortis morti mortem nisi morte dedisset (dedisses).]

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Men measure not only other men, but all other things, by themselves.

Love is a person's idea about his/her needs in other person what you are attracted to.

The power of a man is his present means to obtain some future apparent good.

True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood.

Science [is] knowledge of the truth of Propositions and how things are called.

As a draft-animal is yoked in a wagon, even so the spirit is yoked in this body

The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the appetite of the contractors, and therefore the just value is that which they be contented to give.

If I had read as much as other men I would have known no more than they.

In a Democracy, look how many Demagogs that is how many powerful Orators there are with the people.

Ambition, and Covetousnesse are Passions that are perpetually incumbent, and pressing.

No mans error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

The Enemy has been here in the night of our natural ignorance, and sown the tares of spiritual errors.

Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

No man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himselfe, or any other man.

Let a man (as most men do) rate themselves as the highest Value they can; yet their true Value is no more than it is esteemed by others.

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.

A great leap in the dark

Setting themselves against reason, as often as reason is against them.

There are three things which the public will always clamour for, sooner or later; namely: novelty, novelty, novelty.

Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge.

Such a blush In the midst of brown was born, Like red poppies grown with corn.